Libgart Schwartz Movies
- 1991
In this movie, a woman is going mad, literally, with frustration. Based on a novel by Ingeborg Bachmann, Isabelle Huppert plays the distraught woman who feels that the choice between her uninspiring husband and her indifferent lover warrants ever-escalating displays of rage, distress and loss of self-control. Eventually her self-indulgence leads to her setting her now-demolished Viennese apartment on fire and burning herself alive in it while the movie score plays songs from grand opera to celebrate her dramatic departure from life. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Isabelle Huppert, Mathieu Carrière, (more)
- 1984
An aging Nazi war criminal, "Doktor S.," was convicted of killing more than 11,000 people in Byelorussia and Lithuania during World War II and served 18 years in prison before being released due to poor health, bad eyesight, and old age. He tells his story in this unusual docudrama, leaving the viewers to sort out the limited information gleaned from his recollections. He complains because he lost his good standing with the SS when his brother came to Germany from the U.S. and started criticizing the Nazis. It does not matter that his brother died in Buchenwald; Doktor S. still resents him for ruining his position within the Gestapo. Next, the man explains how he had to work his way back into favor by committing atrocities -- but when confronted with specifics, the story told by Doktor S. raises more questions than it answers. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Robert Kramer
- 1984
Financed in Germany and filmed in New York, Class Relations is adapted from Franz Kafka's unfinished novel Amerika. Christian Heinisch plays a bourgeois German forced to leave his homeland after a scandal. He accepts his uncle's invitation to move to America, where he takes a succession of "Joe Jobs." Heinisch tries, but he is unable to shake off his old-world customs. Worse, the class structure in Europe never prepared him to have to actually use his hands to make a living. Rather than tack on an ending of their own, writer/directors Daniel Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub conclude Class Relations in the same manner that Kafka left Amerika behind when he died--with the hero's ultimate fate still in limbo. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Christian Heinisch
- 1980
This is director Klaus Michael Grueber's third foray into filming a play he directed, and it is both interesting and provocative. Although Grueber is primarily a stage director, he has a good sense of the possibilities of film. For this production he filmed his actors in the Berlin Olympic Stadium and also used an abandoned hotel along the Berlin Wall, as well as a few sets that reproduced among other things, a military cemetery. The time is 1936 -- at least for awhile -- and Hitler is appropriating the Olympic Games in Berlin for his own political purposes. But Grueber also looks at what happened before and after Hitler in these same spaces, tracing the shadows of Nazism and its enemies in German culture and history. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- 1980
This pessimistic and tedious Teutonic drama concerns a family struggling to survive after the death of the father. Left behind is a simple-minded mother (Edith Heedegen), strong-willed but sickly daughter Josefine (Libgart Schwarz), another sister, and a mentally challenged brother with a pronounced limp. Josefine steps up to take charge of the family, making her other sister the maid and forcing her brother to live in the basement. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Libgart Schwartz, Elisabeth Stepanek, (more)
- 1978
In a provincial town in West Germany, the director of the local art society is preparing to put on an exhibit of paintings. The patrons of the society are all upstanding local businessmen and members of the middle class, of not very refined tastes, but they are all a-dither about the painting in the "Capitalist Realism" exhibit which is clearly insulting to a local banker. Nonetheless, in this comedy they all exert themselves to be polite to the painter and his boyfriend. The film is adapted from the play by Botho Strauss. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Libgart Schwartz
- 1971
A loose adaptation of a novelette by author Peter Handke, this early effort from acclaimed director Wim Wenders follows penalized goalie Joseph Bloch (Arthur Brauss) as he makes his way through the city after missing penalty kick and getting suspended from a game. Wandering by a local cinema, Joseph picks up the pretty cashier and the two spend the night together. Inexplicably strangling the girl in the light of the morning, the seemingly unaffected Joseph makes his way through the city streets as emotion begins to boil under the surface of his stony gaze. Making his way to an old girlfriends house in the country, the emotionally shattered goalie has little to do but wait for the police to close in on him. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
